In 1938, Orson Welles inverted the Great Moon Hoax by staging The War of the Worlds as a live radio news broadcast, cheerfully illustrating the principle that a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.
Kaufman is the soul of “Man on the Moon,” but Stipe’s lyrics also refer to a larger bit of American counter-mythology-namely, the culturally embedded suspicion that the 1969 Apollo 11 mission (and the triumphal media narrative that ended with Neil Armstrong’s “one giant leap for mankind”) was nothing more than fake news.Įver since the Great Moon Hoax of 1835, the relationship between official accounts of outer space and hysterical, earthbound conspiracy theories has been inextricable.
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“If you believed they put a man on the moon,” sang Michael Stipe, evincing uncertainty in honor of Andy Kaufman, a peerless put-on artist whose love of masquerade-everything from off-the-clock alter egos to pro wrestling villainy-made him a true icon of untrustworthiness.
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